Reply Vision and attention: the role of training

Joseph et al. reply - We are grateful that Braun has replicated our findings, showing that orientation oddball detection in visual search is severely compromised when paired with an attentional blink task. This confirms our conclusion that tasks that have generally been considered to be 'preattentive', exhibiting parallel search and rapid discrimination performance, actually do require attention. These data favour a unitary large-scale architecture for the visual system, in which all the output of an unlimited-capacity stage (preattentive processing) must pass through a limited-capacity selection stage (attentional selection) before explicit detection. Braun then presents two other experiments which show that such a decrement in performance is reduced with increased training and concludes: " In such observers at least, there does seem to be a 'direct route from preattentive processing to perceptual report'."